


The Darktown Poker Club

by fartherfaster



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Paternal Nick Fury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 19:42:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4534896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fartherfaster/pseuds/fartherfaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick, Alec, Natasha, and a deck of cards.<br/>-<br/>An introspective look at the relationship between Nick Fury, Natasha Romanov, and what it means to be liars and friends.<br/>-<br/>Inspired by the poem <a href="http://www.musicer.net/karaoke-texty-pisni/jimmy-dean/darktown-poker-club">The Darktown Poker Club.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Darktown Poker Club

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sevenfoxes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/gifts).



> There was a poem my father made me memorise as a child – “The Darktown Poker Club” – and I was absently reciting lines to myself whilst doing the dishes when I thought of this little fic. If you’re at all familiar with it, its relevance to this story is apparent. If not, then I hope I do the allusion justice. This is for foxes, because I missed your birthday.
> 
> The poem is quoted in its entirety at the end. If you don't already know it, please read it last, because it'll -ahem- give away the game.

 “Romanova.”

“Hello, Nick.”

Nick leans in her doorway. His black button down is open at the throat and his sleeves are rolled twice. Even in her mind she calls him Nick; Natasha finds the furious moniker too flamboyant to take seriously, and moreover she still feels gleeful running away with whatever insubordination she can get her hands on. She is long off probation and their paths ought to cross only infrequently, but he makes time for her all the same. Now he finds her in her living quarters-cum-office, acting like it’s quitting time when in fact midnight has been and gone.

“Come with me,” he asks. “Bring a jacket.”

She shoulders into the leather jacket that hangs on her hatstand – a landing gift from the Bartons. Nick absently holds out his hand for her as she steps into her boots.

“Where are we going?”

Their elbows knock occasionally as they walk down the echoing hallway. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” he says.

Natasha cuts him a narrow look. She plays a teasing tone into her voice that doesn’t, in their line of work, make the cut, softening none of the blow. “You don’t have any friends, Nick.”

His laughter is a bark into the night air; the skin around both his eyes crinkles pleasantly. Moonlight reflects off the sheen of their jackets, adding to the warmth of his face. He holds an arm out to his side and Natasha steps into his embrace as they descend the long staircase to the sidewalk. “No, I guess I don’t,” Nick agrees mildly. He rubs his palm over her upper arm once, twice. “But I have got you, and that’s better.”

“’Cause they’re scared of me?”

“Uh-huh.” Nick sighs. He looks at the moon for a long moment before he looks to Natasha again. “People are damned fools, except when they’re not.”

-

They pull up to a bungalow in the suburbs of DC; there’s a glassed-in patio and a rock-and-succulent garden that looks extensively and expensively cared for, even in the dingy orange glow of the streetlamps.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Alec,” Nick says. Natasha thinks he’s a little impulsive, like there’s a story behind his teeth that wants to come out into the moonlight. “Alec Pierce.”

Natasha keeps her pace sedate and steady beside him as they meander to the front door. “The Undersecretary of Defense?”

Nick makes an unimpressed sound. “He’d be more use to us in SHIELD instead of running around with red tape and scissors-”

At which point the door swings open, while Nick’s still reaching to push the bell. Pierce’s grin is lopsided, pleased as the proverbial punch.

“But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Nick says.

“Who’s got the birthday comin’ up?” Pierce interrupts him.

“So maybe s’more fool me for trying to talk sense to an animal,” Nick continues, for Natasha’s benefit.

“Animal!” Pierce exclaims. He’s still grinning, his eyes brightly flitting back and forth between Natasha and Nick as he ushers them into the foyer. “From the mouth of a man I once literally found up a fucking tree.”

“Fools don’t look up,” Nick defends himself. The token argument over, they both lean into a backslapping embrace. As they part, he says, “Alec,” and then gestures to Natasha. His eyes convey no wariness, no performance. She holds out a hand. “Alec, this is Agent Romanova. Romanova, meet Undersecretary Pierce.”

“Sir.”

“You’re the one and only, all right,” he says, giving her hand a firm, testing shake. “Nick’s pride and joy, to hear it in my neck of the woods. Man, am I ever glad you’re on our team now.”

Natasha smiles very carefully. She distrusts the men who think of politics as a game, the losses they stake in potentia so far removed from any risk of personal injury. She also distrusts anyone who thinks the line is so clean – she has no allegiance to the United States nor even to the man who is so open with his affection for her. The Red Room wanted her as a weapon that could perform without fail. Natasha wants only to survive; some employers are lax about success like that.

Nick shifts his weight foot-to-foot, immediately aware of her changed demeanour. “We gon stand here all night?” he prickles.

“No!” Pierce jumps, leading them in. “Come on. Agent, have a seat. Nick, you know where the bourbon-and-branch is, help yourself.” He stands opposite Natasha, his fists on his hips as he evaluates her. “And for the lady?”

She’s about to decline when Nick says, “I can guarantee there’s expensive vodka in the freezer.”

“русский Стандарт?” she asks.

“Да,” says Pierce, sounding miffed. “Could I get away with offering you anything less?”

“No,” she tells him, smiling pleasantly.

Pierce laughs again, looking at her with something like wonder open on his face. “You really are something else,” he says. “Just the one and only.”

Nick joins them at the sideboard, the frosting bottle of vodka dripping cool air down Natasha’s arm as he stands beside her. He smiles at her, as soft and honest as when it had been the two of them in the truck. “She’s exceptional, all right.”

Natasha meets his gaze. “I am the exception.”

-

“Now,” says Alec – he insists twice that he doesn’t bring his work home with him and therefore won’t answer to _Mr. Undersecretary_ – “it’s a rite of passage that every good American girl-”

“She’s not an American yet,” Nick says, sounding bored.

“Oh. Huh. Well,” he blinks at Natasha over his gin, “put whatever paperwork there is on my desk and we’ll fix that easy enough,” he tells her and, ostensibly, Nick.

Nick sinks deeper into his armchair and, leaning on his elbow, props his forehead against his index finger. He frowns like he’s thinking about it, like he doesn’t know Natasha could get out from under his nose and the whole damned continent the moment she decides so, American passport or not. She personally takes greater issue with being called a ‘girl’ than an ‘American,’ but she has no inclination to explain that to two men who think they’re older than she, and no desire to disabuse them of the notion. Secrets, Natasha knows, come in handy.

“I was saying,” Alec starts again, standing up from the couch. He waves his hand over the shelves of a bookcase, jogging his memory and unable to find what it is he’s looking for. “It’s an American rite of growing up. A girl’s got to have that one uncle who teaches her all the good stuff. You know,” he turns to look at her again, hand sweeping the air, “how to shoot pool, whiskey, guns-”

“That ship has sailed,” Nick says to his back. Alec ignores him.

“How to change a tire,” Alec elaborates. “Among the three of us,” he lowers his voice a little, “I’ll make no bones about how damned fatherly _Nicolas J. Fury_ is towards you.”

Natasha glances at Nick, but he only shrugs one shoulder. He has greater things to worry about, and Natasha is still thrilled at the idea of powerful allies.

“That leaves _me_ as the proverbial uncle who – aha!” Alec opens a drawer and pulls out a small box, “– whose obligation it is to teach you to cheat at cards.”

-

The Americans have their own games, and Natasha learns the patterns, and the tells, and the keeps very quickly, salty pretzels trading hands. Russian games favoured dice; there was no time for play in the Red Room as a child. The heart of poker, though, is lying. Natasha has not struggled to lie for a very long time.

Alec is thrilled with her performance. When he stands to refill their glasses, Natasha leans on her elbow to speak lowly in Nick’s ear. “You know,” she says mildly, “people have been telling me I had a hell of a poker face for the longest time.”

“And you didn’t…?” He looks skeptical.

Natasha waits.

“Oh,” Nick sighs, “goddamn you, all right. Shit.”

“What?” Alec asks, carefully holding three tumblers in two hands.

“And I fuckin’ fell for it, too. Did you know all along? Have you known this whole time?”

Natasha says nothing, demurely accepting her drink.

“Aw, Christ,” Alec says, catching on. “How the Hell did we miss that?” he demands of Nick.

Natasha doesn’t tell them they were blinded by their comradery, by the fraternal perpetuity assuring them that in this room of friends there must be no one lying. Instead she smiles from the corner of her mouth and plucks the ace of spades out from where she’d pinched it between her knees. Nick and Alec both bluster dramatically, and she tells them: “You must keep both eyes open.”

-

Three years after Bogotá, Nick Fury sleeps in a secure facility, his hands and head and chest all wrapped in inches-thick white gauze.

Natasha watches him with a vigilance that startles the care staff.

When Alec makes an appearance, Nick blessedly sleeps still. Natasha stares at him rigidly. Alec once made light fun of his paternal protection of her; perhaps this shaking in her bones is the paralleled filial rage. “This is your fault,” she whispers fiercely. “Do you see?”

Alec sits on the other side of Nick’s bed like a man defeated. There is something ugly on his face, like he is performing stoicism and leaky regret simultaneously. It is a muddy expression that leaves his fair face ruddy with discomfiture. “I know. Natasha, I know.”

The monitors beep, even and slow.

“If I could tell you how sorry I am-”

“I don’t want to hear it. I want you to see yourself as I see you.” A coward, Natasha thinks, a liar, a man who plays truths like harps and people like cards. Not that she thinks him so different from Nick, or from herself. The truth is, after all, not everything. What angers her is Alec’s righteousness. He thinks he has been playing by the rules. He thinks he has been playing instead of surviving.

The silence yawns like a dog, and Alexander Pierce leaves.

The following week, Natasha accompanies Nick home. He bumps into things sometimes, and three fingers on his dominant hand are still immobilised. There are second-degree burns across most of his chest. She moves around his house like a ghost and allows Nick to stare himself dead in the mirror, shirtless and battered. It’s his body after all, she thinks. It’s his new face. She was once hungry for her reflection, too. She swats his arm when she catches him poking at the bandage.

“Let me,” she says.

“I’m a goddamned grown-ass man,” he complains, sitting obediently where she points to the kitchen table. “I can take care of myself.”

“Yes,” she agrees, laying out the supplies she’ll need to change the bandage. There is a spot of fluid visible on the outermost layer of gauze. “Check the stitches in your fingers.”

The scar is twisted and open still, the eyelid is puffy. She applies the prescribed medication down the length of it with a cotton-tipped swab while Nick grumbles. “The doctor said the deeper ocular muscles still work, and so will your eyelid, when the swelling is down,” she tells him quietly. “But perhaps a patch.”

“That bad?”

“You frighten the ranks enough as it is. Besides, what’s another secret.”

“It’s that bad. You’re a bad liar.”

“I’m the best liar.”

“Yeah.” He catches her hand for a moment and just holds it in his lap.

“I’m sorry, Nick.” She doesn’t reach for his shoulder, his cheek. She is still wearing gloves. She will have to change the one he has touched.

He squeezes her hand once and then lets it go. “Me too, Nat.”

-

In the bunker, her shoulder aching for the loss of a bullet, Natasha hears Nick say the words: “I didn’t know who I could trust.” She understands, objectively. He tries to apologise, in his way, but Natasha had no anger in the first place. She has told too many lies – told Nick himself too many lies – but there is something very deep inside that hurts. That is the truth. She stands from the table and turns back to the war in the sky. The truth is not all things.

“You’re my one good eye,” he tells her. “But one isn’t enough.”

Natasha smiles sadly at her hands. Behind her, the voices of Hill, Wilson, and Rogers bounce off the concrete. “You’ve got to keep both eyes open.”

Nick puts his hand on her shoulder, gently. Natasha leans into the touch.

-

The three of them standing in the World Security Council room while the North Tower falls feels like dark comedy to the night they met thirteen years previous. Alec thinks he’s dealing; Natasha knows there are cards in play that are out of his reach.

“Don’t worry,” she says sweetly. “Company’s coming.” The blades of the helicopter roar, its artificial wind shrieking over every glass and metal lip it tumbles across. The bones of Alec’s hand, so aged now, show through where he grips the stem of his champagne flute too tightly. He smiles at her, ugly and short.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

She sets the files to release, watching as names she knows, names she doesn’t, names that were once hers all flow out into the sphere of consumption. What a feeling, she thinks, to be eaten alive. What a strange gift, to give someone your ghosts.

“Are you ready for the world to see you as you really are?” Alec asks her. He has always been frightened of what he didn’t know. He has always been frightened of her, no matter how he tried to mask it. She thinks of a secure care facility and its cold, sterile air, how away from whence walked a man unable to face the consequences of his actions. Perhaps, Natasha considers now, perhaps he was only upset that the explosion hadn’t killed Nick, that his hand had been thwarted by the Fates. 

Natasha stares him dead in the face and invites him to find a reflection of himself in his words. “Are you?”

The moment Natasha waits for arrives with little fanfare. Alec has a charge over her heart and a gun in her back; Nick lowers his weapon with something helpless on his face. He will not see her hurt. That is the truth of thirteen years; that is the reason Natasha went to his side in the first place. She had needed back then for It success to come not at the cost of surviving. But the truth is not all things, and in a room of three breathing liars, is it not a smart commodity.

She depresses the charge on her Widow’s Bite. When she wakes up, there is Nick’s blurry face so near hers.

“ _Natasha_!”

“Those really do sting,” she mumbles. Her eyes won’t focus and her hands tremble. It will wear off soon, but Nick will have to pilot them off the building first. He helps her to her feet.

Neither mention the dead man on the floor. He is dead, but not really; the echo of him is so loud in the long corridor. Natasha, helping Nick strap in his bad arm, thinks it is so strange how liars alive tell only truths in their deaths. Nick catches her gaze before she moves to the back of the bird, and there is so much exchanged between them. The tasks before them stretch huge, and there is all the likelihood that they will never see each other breathing in the moonlight ever again.

Natasha straps herself into her seat. Nick lifts off. This is the hand they've been dealt, but the game is not over yet.

The truth is not all things.

**Author's Note:**

> Bill Jackson was a poor old dub,  
> Who joined the Darktown Poker Club  
> But cursed the day he told them he would join.  
> His money used to go like it had wings  
> If he held Queens, someone had Kings  
> And each night he would contribute all his coins.  
> He said I'm going to play em tight tonight  
> No bobtail flush is gonna make me bite  
> When I get's in, my hands going to be a peach.  
> So he played em tight, but lost his pile  
> And Bill got peevish after a while  
> So he rose, got up, and made this speech.
> 
> He said - Now you all see this brand new razor  
> I've had it sharpened just today  
> And I'm comin''- in with my own rules  
> That you must follow as you play.  
> Now keep them boney hands on the table when you deal'em please  
> And don't be slipp'en any aces down there in between your knees.  
> And don't make any of them funny signs like your trying to tip off your hand  
> Just talk in American, boy American - so's I can understand.  
> And don't be dealing off the bottom, cause Oh! that's rough  
> Just take Five, Five - then stop, that's enough.  
> Now when you bet, put up them chips, cause I don't like it when you shy.  
> If you get busted - go get some, cause I won't be here by & by.  
> Pass them cards for me to shuffle every time before you deal  
> Then if anything wrong, I must see.  
> Cause you ain't going to play this game according to Mr. Hoyle,  
> You're going to play this here game according to me.
> 
> Now sitting right there at that there clan  
> There chanced to be a one eyed man  
> And Bill kept watching from the corner of his eye.  
> If ol' one-eye would deal'em then  
> It would have cost that Bill another five or ten.  
> So he rose, looked all around and with a sigh,  
> He said 'Lord' he said - but it's an awful shame,  
> But there's someone cheating in this here game  
> Of course it don't do for me to name the guy.  
> So I'll refrain from mentioning the party's name  
> But if I catch him cheating just once again  
> I'm gonna take my fist and close that other eye.
> 
> Now you all see this brand new razor  
> Well I've had it sharpened just today  
> I'm comin' in with my own rules  
> That you must follow when you play. - Egad  
> Keep your hands up there when you deal'em please  
> And don't be puttin' those wildies slip in between your knees.  
> And don't make them funny signs like your trying to tip off your hand  
> Just talk American - Big A-A-A so's I can understand.  
> And don't be takin' off the bottom, cause I've told you before - that's rough!  
> This is the Army game, Five, Five - then halt, that's enough.  
> When you bet, let's see them Reds and Blues, cause I don't like it when you shy.  
> If you run out of gas - go get pumped up, I won't be here by & by.  
> Pass them pasteboards for me to shuffle every time before you deal - let me ripple.  
> Anything's wrong, I wanna see.  
> I mean you ain't gonna play this game now according to Mr. Hoyle,  
> You're going to play this game according to me.  
> Henry, if you break the seal on them new set of Bicycles - we'll go on from here... Yeah, yeah, yeah.


End file.
